Meanwhile,.NET is vastly superior and is mopping the floor with Java. Why? Because Java sucks.
Wow, objectivity. "Vastly superior", sorry, must strongly disagree. Competitive, totally. I see.NET as the replacement for VB6, and for some Java web application development (for those that have been burned by bad practices). I don't see it replacing most cross-platform or server-side applications that need to run on *NIX.
Why should I have to mess with a classpath when I can just include references in a build file or dump a binary into a "magic" directory?
Erm, you've been able to do that with JARs since 1997. And, what, the.NET GAC isn't a "magic" directory? Please.
That's not to say they didn't take some lessons from Java, but the fact is.NET is way nicer than Java.
That would be your opinion. I happen to think.NET is quite nice in many respects, but you're fawning over it a bit too much.
I'd love to use.NET to make cross-platform apps that work as well as.NET on Windows does now.
Herein lies the problem:.NET will never eclipse Java on the server side because it inherently is Windows-only. The Mono team had their chance to become a major mainstream alternative, but it seems quite likely to remain a useful niche rather than a major popular approach.
And frankly, the world is getting ready to move on from Java and.NET anyway within the next 5 years. Most that don't want to run Java will not turn to a sibling, they'll look beyond it.
Unless something comes along that pays a living wage, not even 20 years from now. The race for cheap labor is a race to the bottom, not to the top.
This ignores productivity gains. Wages rise as a national productivity rises.
All of this talk about how trade is going to destroy our future, in my respectful opinion, false. The real problem you're talking about occurs if U.S. productivity eventually lags the rest of the world's productivty. That currently isn't the case. It is of note, however that U.S. productivity, which grew in the 1990's, seems to becoming stagnant again, as it has been since the 70's (and is arguably a major factor in why wages have been stagnant).
No, I'm saying that if they want to sell goods here, then they have to pay equal to American wages. If they don't want to pay equal to American wages, then I see NO reason why we should allow their imports AT ALL.
Because trade enriches both nations. I know you don't believe that, but I do, and I do think the data is available that proves it: you make the stuff here, it's no longer as cheap for the consumer.
The primary issue we have is to transition the population towards more productive labour -- that would be highly skilled labour, service labour, or knowledge work. The "burger-flipping economy" assumes no increase in education or training in the workforce. This can, and has changed in the past (The G.I's bill of rights after WW2, for example).
Besides issues with education, something the U.S. has faltered on for years, the economic world has very few macro tools for measuring, let alone increasing, productivity in the service sector. It happens, but we don't know how.
So, new and groundbreaking, in your mind, has nothing to do with economics or market innovation, and everything to do with scientific discovery?
By this logic, a mobile phone wasn't ground breaking (it was done in cars before that), or Wal Mart wasn't ground breaking (stores aren't new), or even the adoption of Novocaine for dental work wasn't groundbreaking (other painkillers exist).
Either you don't have an entrepreneurial bone in your body, or you're a jackass.
Arguably, certain terrorists view Islamist theocracy as the only legitimate form of government. That would not be a very free state.
Sure, they would start with Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. They've tried, and are even succeeding in some cases.
But the major thing they hate is our support for dictators in the Middle East that block their efforts towards establishing new theocratic states, either by democratic vote or by coup. The U.S., even though it's "committed to democracy", would rather have a friendly dictator in place than a democratically elected government that rejects the USA. This can be a messy argument (is a theocratic state truly free? etc.)
There is no correlation between IT spending and productivity or profitability.
This is the same old saw that hardware firms used in the 1980s-1990s. Gartner used to say you should spend on IT as a proportion of your revenue.
But numerous studies, based on publicly available data, debunk that view as bullshit.
It's not that IT is bad -- it's just that you have to blame or praise management for the proper application of it. Which is just another way of saying "you can't spend your way through problems without thought".
NOW, there's a valid argument here, but it's a lot more subtle than the bylines. One has to dig into Papadopoulos' quotes to get the jist of this as: "you should have the management insight to take advantage of the inherent cost savings that are due to Moore's law." This has been hampered for decades due to inflexibility with the software -- something that virtualization and utility computing is seeking to fix, and an area that Sun wants to compete in. Indeed, this is a big deal.
But it doesn't mean your computing needs will skyrocket, unless your management has an insightful, productive application for all of that power. Google does (selling advertisements along side day-to-day networked computing needs), but I'm not sure the rest of the Fortune 500 has turned to apply that level of creativity to their situation.
While the bandwidth consumption of this app seems disgraceful, I note that a disconnected web architecture is becoming commonplace. Many development environments embed a small web server to serve up documentation; instead of IIS, I've seen Apache Tomcat installed on desktops; and Google Gears provides true offline browser-side state thru an embedded SQLLite database.
Synchronizing SQL Server per desktop, assuming Personal edition, is a fairly modest footprint, though has some ugly licensing implications.
I would also note that it's pretty unlikely that NetCraft is surveying the domains of part-time connected clients, even if they are running IIS. Sure, the parked GoDaddy domains are a different story.
Anyway, not an MS shill, I work for a competitor. I think your rant is interesting but likely unrelated to the NetCraft survey.
I find the number of alts on a mature server tends to keep the economy alive for lower level items. Yes, they're priced higher than they were before the expansion, but not crazily so. If one is absolutely new to the game it's best they don't join a mature server unless they know people.
As for the rep & level grind, at first I was rather disappointed, being decked out in BWL Tier 2 gear (God knows how the Naxx folk felt), but found a few things as I leveled: - T1 gear from Molten Core was easily replaced by greens - The T2 gear was usually superior to 80% of the greens that dropped. I think I switched one-two out around level 68, and the rest at 70 through blue dungeon loot. - Anyone in T3's from Naxx or AQ gear would probably have been able to keep it through 70.
I haven't focused too much on faction grinding other than getting Revered for my Heroic keys. Getting exalted with Scryers was not that much work if you took your time. Comparatively, the rep grind in the original game was sheer torture.
The biggest disappointment for me is to not be able to see the obsolete content. Our guild had BWL on farm and was working on AQ40 (Sartura) when the expansion came out. It's unlikely I'll ever get to see C'Thun or any of Naxx other than in videos, unless we decide to try it on a lark. Likewise, we currently have Gruul on farm, and are close to getting Mag down. I expect we'll be able to progress through Zul'Aman (when it comes out), Serpentshrine and The Eye through the Fall & Winter... But, depending on when the expansion comes out, it's not clear we'll see Hyjal or Black Temple.
It works both ways: the majority of iPods don't have replaceable batteries, if I'm buying an 'iPod phone', it's reasonable to assume it doesn't have a battery.
This whole thread has been one hypothetical piled on another, and while entertaining, has little substance. There is, quite plainly, no law that directly or indirectly suggests that a product must conform to the features the competition offers! The only constraints that are common across competitors are those required by FCC regulation and interoperability protocols for the industry.
And most banks & telephone companies insist on having a copy of it. All the automated systems are built around it ("please enter the last 4 digits of your SSN, followed by the # sigh").... If you refuse to give it, you're stuck in operator queue hell.
No, you don't need those things. You think you do, but you don't. The internet was intended to spread information. Text and hyperlinks are a great way to get that across. But somewhere, someone(s) started playing with other types of content like images, animated images, built-in programmability (Javascript/ECMA script), and embedded programs and other types of media (flash, video, audio).
Information is not just text. The architecture of the web was to allow *any* resource to be hyperlinked, including mobile code. The web never would have become a popular medium (no more than Gopher was in 1993, anyway) if it were just text on a screen. The addition of IMG and TABLE had a lot to do with its growth.
Therefore, I believe it is much better to take a conservative approach to adopting standards that go beyond basic text.
Do you even live in the same world as we do? It's not the 1980's man.
XHTML offers one big benefit that many bad web developers, like yourself, fail to see. That is strict parsing and failures associated with parse errors
XHTML offers one big downside, that many bad programmers, like yourself, fail to see. It doesn't follow the Robustness Principle.
The point is not that there should be warnings about bad markup, but a user agent shouldn't reject it completely. Whereas XML parsers tend to blow up way too easily.
You can't enforce strictness unless you control both the producer & consumer code. A diverse marketplace of parsers and editors and renderers makes for a mess, and strictness just forces end-users to deal with the mess (denying access due to strictness), when it's not their job. It takes *years*, if not decades, for multiple code lines to interoperate on a complex standards. As an example, for a long time, there was only one mainstream implementation of the TCP/IP stack out there: BSD.
Beyond this, there's an issue of evolvability & extensibility. XML has been twisted beyond recognition by misguided attempts to impose order and predictability with the introduction of XML Schemas. Whoops, there goes the extensibility. Oh, but I can version my schemas & design for extensibility! Actually, that's a pretty hard thing too that they're still working on fixing. In particular, the Unique Particle Attribution rule has had a major stifling effect.
There's one good feature of XHTML, today, in my opinion: parsing is cheaper for Microformat consumers. Good HTML parsers are hard to come by, XML parsers are a dime a dozen.
While not doing your job is unethical, I don't believe there's any problem with browsing online boards while at work. It really depends on context. If I'm in the software industry, I'm going to keep abreast of the latest news & uninformed opinion on Slashdot. If I'm a trader, investor, or senior manager, why wouldn't I read Yahoo! finance or Motley Fool forums? It's a way of keeping a pulse on a widely diverse cross-section of people.
So, the real point is NOT that this is for a single household, but rather that you drastically reduce the number of intermediaries required for a network point of presence. This drastically reduces the cost of fibre-to-the-home. The last mile problem really isn't one in urban centres -- there is plenty of fibre to go around, but not enough money to make the transmission of content worthwhile.
And , yes, the article is a not-so-subtle advertisement for the Cisco CRS-1 routing system. Hopefully others will follow with this kind of model...
Well... To absolutely saturate a 40 Gbs network connection, it probably would cost $600-800k. EMC has storage arrays in this range, often for data warehousing. To be able to saturate 40 Gb, you'd probably need around 250 drives and 12 fibre channels (which could wind up being 3x quad cards). Add on another 4 to 5x 10 GigE cards configured into an 802.3ab aggregate link. All of this requires a heck of a lot of bus bandwidth and the ability ability to support 8x 8-lane PCIe I/O cards. A mid-range SMP server could probably pull it off.
This isn't that far away, however, from commodity hardware. An Apple Mac Pro with XServe RAID, for example, can support 3x PCIe slots, and 4x Seagate Barracuda internal SATA 3gb drives, which have a sustained transfer rate of 72 MB/sec each, or 2.3 Gb/sec. The XServe RAID would add another 4 Gb/sec to that. Add a 10 GigE card, and we have around 6 Gb being stored by a sub-$50k hardware solution.
I'm saddened by this. Both D-Link and Linksys have my scorn, but I've had good experiences with Netgear.
Apple has been mildly redeemed with the new Airport Extreme 802.11n Base Station (AEBS), which has been a champ. This after the horrible, horrible, take-2-years-to-patch-it-right Airport Extreme 802.11g. Though even they screwed up the new AEBS where one couldn't use VPN with the new AEBS until the first patch.
You do realize that RSS originally stood for "RDF Site Summary", I hope.
Generic containers like Atom and microformats are useful, but we really lack an interoperable medium for conveying managed data - ie. Stuff that's been normalized for manipulation and integrity. Not that it should be the only form for all data, but that most data should be able to be gleaned into something like RDF.
The world of course will progress without RDF or SPARQL, but they certainly look to remove a fair amount effort in interoperability... Which, far from AI fantasies, seems quite pragmatic.
While it isn't likely this book's author has "the" replacement for the foundation of computer science, this isn't the only voice calling for a change in foundation from algorithms, the Von Neumann model, and Turing machines. The Interactive Computing school of thought is pretty interesting, for example, with some pretty heavyweight names behind the idea, such as Robin Milner (of the pi-Calculus).
Voice quality is quite good in the phone itself. The quality of network varies depending on your location. I've been in the Washington D.C. area and it was clear. In Toronto, roaming with Rogers has also been great.
This is from the "Settings -> General -> About -> Legal" screen inside the iPhone, which lists all software licenses (it's a huge list, lots of open source software too). They include full copies of the GPL v2 and LGPL v2 on this screen.
There are lots of other licenses from particular libraries and/or programs, some proprietary, some free, but the above are what I noticed that referred to GPL or LGPL.
I assume the libgcc and libstdc++ are used for other open source GNU programs, and Apple is using another library (they embed the AT&T C Library, for example) for their proprietary iPhone applications, though this probably needs verification.
I went to an AT&T store to get the pre-approved credit check; the last thing I wanted was for something to go wrong at home and to have to go back *IN* to the store. The staff was courteous, but the credit checks tended to make the line go a lot slower than an Apple Store would have been.
The biggest problem was supply - the store in Virginia that I went to seemed to only have 30 phones on Friday, and sold out of 8GB models quickly. I managed to snag the 2nd last phone, a 4GB model. Friends at other stores in the area also experienced low stock at AT&T stores, whereas the Tyson's Corner Apple Store had well over 500+ phones, given the lineups serviced there without a shortfall.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, .NET is vastly superior and is mopping the floor with Java. Why? Because Java sucks.
.NET as the replacement for VB6, and for some Java web application development (for those that have been burned by bad practices). I don't see it replacing most cross-platform or server-side applications that need to run on *NIX.
.NET GAC isn't a "magic" directory? Please.
.NET is way nicer than Java.
.NET is quite nice in many respects, but you're fawning over it a bit too much.
.NET to make cross-platform apps that work as well as .NET on Windows does now.
.NET will never eclipse Java on the server side because it inherently is Windows-only. The Mono team had their chance to become a major mainstream alternative, but it seems quite likely to remain a useful niche rather than a major popular approach.
.NET anyway within the next 5 years. Most that don't want to run Java will not turn to a sibling, they'll look beyond it.
Wow, objectivity. "Vastly superior", sorry, must strongly disagree. Competitive, totally. I see
Why should I have to mess with a classpath when I can just include references in a build file or dump a binary into a "magic" directory?
Erm, you've been able to do that with JARs since 1997. And, what, the
That's not to say they didn't take some lessons from Java, but the fact is
That would be your opinion. I happen to think
I'd love to use
Herein lies the problem:
And frankly, the world is getting ready to move on from Java and
Well, I'm glad you've got it all figured out. Have fun hugging your copies of Das Kapital.
Unless something comes along that pays a living wage, not even 20 years from now. The race for cheap labor is a race to the bottom, not to the top.
This ignores productivity gains. Wages rise as a national productivity rises.
All of this talk about how trade is going to destroy our future, in my respectful opinion, false. The real problem you're talking about occurs if U.S. productivity eventually lags the rest of the world's productivty. That currently isn't the case. It is of note, however that U.S. productivity, which grew in the 1990's, seems to becoming stagnant again, as it has been since the 70's (and is arguably a major factor in why wages have been stagnant).
No, I'm saying that if they want to sell goods here, then they have to pay equal to American wages. If they don't want to pay equal to American wages, then I see NO reason why we should allow their imports AT ALL.
Because trade enriches both nations. I know you don't believe that, but I do, and I do think the data is available that proves it: you make the stuff here, it's no longer as cheap for the consumer.
The primary issue we have is to transition the population towards more productive labour -- that would be highly skilled labour, service labour, or knowledge work. The "burger-flipping economy" assumes no increase in education or training in the workforce. This can, and has changed in the past (The G.I's bill of rights after WW2, for example).
Besides issues with education, something the U.S. has faltered on for years, the economic world has very few macro tools for measuring, let alone increasing, productivity in the service sector. It happens, but we don't know how.
So, new and groundbreaking, in your mind, has nothing to do with economics or market innovation, and everything to do with scientific discovery?
By this logic, a mobile phone wasn't ground breaking (it was done in cars before that), or Wal Mart wasn't ground breaking (stores aren't new), or even the adoption of Novocaine for dental work wasn't groundbreaking (other painkillers exist).
Either you don't have an entrepreneurial bone in your body, or you're a jackass.
Touché.
Arguably, certain terrorists view Islamist theocracy as the only legitimate form of government. That would not be a very free state.
Sure, they would start with Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. They've tried, and are even succeeding in some cases.
But the major thing they hate is our support for dictators in the Middle East that block their efforts towards establishing new theocratic states, either by democratic vote or by coup. The U.S., even though it's "committed to democracy", would rather have a friendly dictator in place than a democratically elected government that rejects the USA. This can be a messy argument (is a theocratic state truly free? etc.)
There is no correlation between IT spending and productivity or profitability.
This is the same old saw that hardware firms used in the 1980s-1990s. Gartner used to say you should spend on IT as a proportion of your revenue.
But numerous studies, based on publicly available data, debunk that view as bullshit.
It's not that IT is bad -- it's just that you have to blame or praise management for the proper application of it. Which is just another way of saying "you can't spend your way through problems without thought".
NOW, there's a valid argument here, but it's a lot more subtle than the bylines. One has to dig into Papadopoulos' quotes to get the jist of this as: "you should have the management insight to take advantage of the inherent cost savings that are due to Moore's law." This has been hampered for decades due to inflexibility with the software -- something that virtualization and utility computing is seeking to fix, and an area that Sun wants to compete in. Indeed, this is a big deal.
But it doesn't mean your computing needs will skyrocket, unless your management has an insightful, productive application for all of that power. Google does (selling advertisements along side day-to-day networked computing needs), but I'm not sure the rest of the Fortune 500 has turned to apply that level of creativity to their situation.
Look how many governments are banning incandescent bulbs: Australia, The Netherlands, California, Ontario, etc.
An outright ban bothers me.
While the bandwidth consumption of this app seems disgraceful, I note that a disconnected web architecture is becoming commonplace. Many development environments embed a small web server to serve up documentation; instead of IIS, I've seen Apache Tomcat installed on desktops; and Google Gears provides true offline browser-side state thru an embedded SQLLite database.
Synchronizing SQL Server per desktop, assuming Personal edition, is a fairly modest footprint, though has some ugly licensing implications.
I would also note that it's pretty unlikely that NetCraft is surveying the domains of part-time connected clients, even if they are running IIS. Sure, the parked GoDaddy domains are a different story.
Anyway, not an MS shill, I work for a competitor. I think your rant is interesting but likely unrelated to the NetCraft survey.
I find the number of alts on a mature server tends to keep the economy alive for lower level items. Yes, they're priced higher than they were before the expansion, but not crazily so. If one is absolutely new to the game it's best they don't join a mature server unless they know people.
As for the rep & level grind, at first I was rather disappointed, being decked out in BWL Tier 2 gear (God knows how the Naxx folk felt), but found a few things as I leveled:
- T1 gear from Molten Core was easily replaced by greens
- The T2 gear was usually superior to 80% of the greens that dropped. I think I switched one-two out around level 68, and the rest at 70 through blue dungeon loot.
- Anyone in T3's from Naxx or AQ gear would probably have been able to keep it through 70.
I haven't focused too much on faction grinding other than getting Revered for my Heroic keys. Getting exalted with Scryers was not that much work if you took your time. Comparatively, the rep grind in the original game was sheer torture.
The biggest disappointment for me is to not be able to see the obsolete content. Our guild had BWL on farm and was working on AQ40 (Sartura) when the expansion came out. It's unlikely I'll ever get to see C'Thun or any of Naxx other than in videos, unless we decide to try it on a lark. Likewise, we currently have Gruul on farm, and are close to getting Mag down. I expect we'll be able to progress through Zul'Aman (when it comes out), Serpentshrine and The Eye through the Fall & Winter... But, depending on when the expansion comes out, it's not clear we'll see Hyjal or Black Temple.
s/battery/replaceable battery
It works both ways: the majority of iPods don't have replaceable batteries, if I'm buying an 'iPod phone', it's reasonable to assume it doesn't have a battery.
This whole thread has been one hypothetical piled on another, and while entertaining, has little substance.
There is, quite plainly, no law that directly or indirectly suggests that a product must conform to the features the competition offers! The only constraints that are common across competitors are those required by FCC regulation and interoperability protocols for the industry.
And most banks & telephone companies insist on having a copy of it. All the automated systems are built around it ("please enter the last 4 digits of your SSN, followed by the # sigh").... If you refuse to give it, you're stuck in operator queue hell.
No, you don't need those things. You think you do, but you don't. The internet was intended to spread information. Text and hyperlinks are a great way to get that across. But somewhere, someone(s) started playing with other types of content like images, animated images, built-in programmability (Javascript/ECMA script), and embedded programs and other types of media (flash, video, audio).
Information is not just text. The architecture of the web was to allow *any* resource to be hyperlinked, including mobile code. The web never would have become a popular medium (no more than Gopher was in 1993, anyway) if it were just text on a screen. The addition of IMG and TABLE had a lot to do with its growth.
Therefore, I believe it is much better to take a conservative approach to adopting standards that go beyond basic text.
Do you even live in the same world as we do? It's not the 1980's man.
XHTML offers one big benefit that many bad web developers, like yourself, fail to see. That is strict parsing and failures associated with parse errors
XHTML offers one big downside, that many bad programmers, like yourself, fail to see. It doesn't follow the Robustness Principle.
The point is not that there should be warnings about bad markup, but a user agent shouldn't reject it completely. Whereas XML parsers tend to blow up way too easily.
You can't enforce strictness unless you control both the producer & consumer code. A diverse marketplace of parsers and editors and renderers makes for a mess, and strictness just forces end-users to deal with the mess (denying access due to strictness), when it's not their job. It takes *years*, if not decades, for multiple code lines to interoperate on a complex standards. As an example, for a long time, there was only one mainstream implementation of the TCP/IP stack out there: BSD.
Beyond this, there's an issue of evolvability & extensibility. XML has been twisted beyond recognition by misguided attempts to impose order and predictability with the introduction of XML Schemas. Whoops, there goes the extensibility. Oh, but I can version my schemas & design for extensibility! Actually, that's a pretty hard thing too that they're still working on fixing. In particular, the Unique Particle Attribution rule has had a major stifling effect.
There's one good feature of XHTML, today, in my opinion: parsing is cheaper for Microformat consumers. Good HTML parsers are hard to come by, XML parsers are a dime a dozen.
While not doing your job is unethical, I don't believe there's any problem with browsing online boards while at work. It really depends on context. If I'm in the software industry, I'm going to keep abreast of the latest news & uninformed opinion on Slashdot. If I'm a trader, investor, or senior manager, why wouldn't I read Yahoo! finance or Motley Fool forums? It's a way of keeping a pulse on a widely diverse cross-section of people.
So, the real point is NOT that this is for a single household, but rather that you drastically reduce the number of intermediaries required for a network point of presence. This drastically reduces the cost of fibre-to-the-home. The last mile problem really isn't one in urban centres -- there is plenty of fibre to go around, but not enough money to make the transmission of content worthwhile.
And , yes, the article is a not-so-subtle advertisement for the Cisco CRS-1 routing system. Hopefully others will follow with this kind of model...
Well... To absolutely saturate a 40 Gbs network connection, it probably would cost $600-800k. EMC has storage arrays in this range, often for data warehousing. To be able to saturate 40 Gb, you'd probably need around 250 drives and 12 fibre channels (which could wind up being 3x quad cards). Add on another 4 to 5x 10 GigE cards configured into an 802.3ab aggregate link. All of this requires a heck of a lot of bus bandwidth and the ability ability to support 8x 8-lane PCIe I/O cards. A mid-range SMP server could probably pull it off.
This isn't that far away, however, from commodity hardware. An Apple Mac Pro with XServe RAID, for example, can support 3x PCIe slots, and 4x Seagate Barracuda internal SATA 3gb drives, which have a sustained transfer rate of 72 MB/sec each, or 2.3 Gb/sec. The XServe RAID would add another 4 Gb/sec to that. Add a 10 GigE card, and we have around 6 Gb being stored by a sub-$50k hardware solution.
I'm saddened by this. Both D-Link and Linksys have my scorn, but I've had good experiences with Netgear.
Apple has been mildly redeemed with the new Airport Extreme 802.11n Base Station (AEBS), which has been a champ. This after the horrible, horrible, take-2-years-to-patch-it-right Airport Extreme 802.11g. Though even they screwed up the new AEBS where one couldn't use VPN with the new AEBS until the first patch.
You do realize that RSS originally stood for "RDF Site Summary", I hope.
Generic containers like Atom and microformats are useful, but we really lack an interoperable medium for conveying managed data - ie. Stuff that's been normalized for manipulation and integrity. Not that it should be the only form for all data, but that most data should be able to be gleaned into something like RDF.
The world of course will progress without RDF or SPARQL, but they certainly look to remove a fair amount effort in interoperability... Which, far from AI fantasies, seems quite pragmatic.
While it isn't likely this book's author has "the" replacement for the foundation of computer science, this isn't the only voice calling for a change in foundation from algorithms, the Von Neumann model, and Turing machines. The Interactive Computing school of thought is pretty interesting, for example, with some pretty heavyweight names behind the idea, such as Robin Milner (of the pi-Calculus).
I bet the developer's build had a shell terminal. It could just be stuff they didnt bother removing from base OS X.
Voice quality is quite good in the phone itself. The quality of network varies depending on your location. I've been in the Washington D.C. area and it was clear. In Toronto, roaming with Rogers has also been great.
I doubt that most will cancel their service.
This is from the "Settings -> General -> About -> Legal" screen inside the iPhone, which lists all software licenses (it's a huge list, lots of open source software too). They include full copies of the GPL v2 and LGPL v2 on this screen.
GPLv2:
- libgcc
- libstdc++
LGPLv2:
- libiconv
- ncurses
- KHTML
- SpiderMonkey and DateCode.cpp
- PCRE
There are lots of other licenses from particular libraries and/or programs, some proprietary, some free, but the above are what I noticed that referred to GPL or LGPL.
I assume the libgcc and libstdc++ are used for other open source GNU programs, and Apple is using another library (they embed the AT&T C Library, for example) for their proprietary iPhone applications, though this probably needs verification.
I went to an AT&T store to get the pre-approved credit check; the last thing I wanted was for something to go wrong at home and to have to go back *IN* to the store. The staff was courteous, but the credit checks tended to make the line go a lot slower than an Apple Store would have been.
The biggest problem was supply - the store in Virginia that I went to seemed to only have 30 phones on Friday, and sold out of 8GB models quickly. I managed to snag the 2nd last phone, a 4GB model. Friends at other stores in the area also experienced low stock at AT&T stores, whereas the Tyson's Corner Apple Store had well over 500+ phones, given the lineups serviced there without a shortfall.
If it senses networks in the area, it will pop up and ask you if you want to join any one of them.
After you've said "yes", it will auto rejoin if it sees it again.
(Based on my own iPhone's tests)